My first experience with Steintrikes came in 2004 when I reviewed the Viper. That trike, like most of the Serbian company’s designs at the time, was designed to be simple and inexpensive. It worked well enough, but wasn’t particularly memorable. For a few years, I almost forgot that the company existed. Then, over the next few years, they switched their focus away from trying to be Europe’s budget brand and began to produce some of the wildest and most memorable full suspension trikes in the world. Their designs transformed from utilitarian and somewhat boring to sophisticated and maniacal. It’s as if they came unhinged and decided to stop trying to build trikes that were meant for the widest possible audience and instead build what they wanted to build. A prime example of this philosophy is the 26″ rear wheel Explorer model that I’ll be reviewing here.

Part of the reason that this test is coming now is that Steintrikes hasn’t just been making waves with their radical designs. They’ve also begun to build a US dealer network for 2013. Pretty soon, these once-rare birds won’t be nearly so rare anymore. We got our Explorer from one of the first of this new dealer network.

I’m quite happy that Steintrikes will be more widely available here because it gave me a chance to check something off the bucket list. I’ve lusted after a chance to ride one of these crazy contraptions for years. As soon as I got the Explorer out of the box and took my first really close look at it, I knew I wouldn’t be disappointed. It’s a complex, innovative, intimidating and beautiful thing.

First and foremost is that fantastic and impossible-to-ignore double-wishbone front suspension design. The two horizontally mounted front shocks and the heavily triangulated cross members look they’d be perfectly at home on a 1980’s Formula One car or a Dune Buggy. The oversized idlers also add to the imposing, purposeful look.

The more you look at the Explorer, the more you realize the staggering amount of man hours that must go into building one of these machines. I counted 94 welds on the Explorer’s frame. There are just so many tubes. A majority of frame is made from Mannessmann ST52 precision steel. The front boom and the folding section that it attaches to are aluminum. The welds on both the steel and alloy parts are impeccable, as was the powder coat.

The entire trike is covered with metal-flake finish, but blue parts were especially attractive. Steintrikes will make your new trike in almost any color combo you can think of. It appears that most Steintrikes owners have rather vivid imaginations and some of the combinations they’ve thought of are quite memorable. I’ve seen Streintrikes in every color combo from black on black to hot pink and neon green. I went with a fairly conservative blue and gray combination because it matches this one web site that I like a lot.

The Explorer’s fit and finish did have a few flaws. Very close inspection revealed a few somewhat crude bits. There are often bolts where you’d REALLY rather have a quick release and a couple of hose clamps on the mesh seat.

It can’t go without mentioning that this is a rather large trike. Its large drivewheel makes the the length rather foreboding and the high ground clearance makes it appear even larger than it actually is. Luckily, Steintrikes equips the Explorer with a clever folding boom that greatly reduces the trike’s length. It won’t help it get into the trunk of a hatchback but it’s a huge help if you’re trying to put it into a minivan or the back of a short-bed pick-up truck. I didn’t know they had minivans and short-bed pick-ups in Serbia but this trike seems like it was designed especially for them.

If you need to make the Explorer even smaller and have some time, the frame can be split into two pieces rather easily. If you have a fair amount of tools and even more patience, you can make this trike downright tiny due to it’s somewhat-complicated suspension design and it’s many bolts and pivots.

Like most Steintrikes designs, the Explorer is quite modular. This means that you can order it with 16”, 18″ or 20″ wheels on the front. There’s an adjustment in the rear swingarm to make sure steering geometry stays the same. I went with the 26×20 on my test trike.

It appears that most Steintrikes will be shipped to the USA as framesets and built up to customer preferences by individual dealers from there. I didn’t really make too many particular requests in advance and my trike came with a nine-speed Shimano drivetrain that used Alivio derailleurs and Dura-Ace bar-end shifters. There was also a fairly low-end Shimano 11-32 cassette and an Origin 8 crankset with a square taper bottom bracket. Avid BB-7 disc brakes were fitted and attached to locking brake levers. The wheels all spun on Bitex hubs with double-wall Jet Set alloy rims and Schwalbe Marathon Racer tires in the front. In light of the current unpredictable weather conditions, Velo Verde put a beefier Schwalbe Plus Tour on the rear. I found some of the components a bit disappointing, but as I said above, I don’t expect that too many Steintrikes will leave the dealer floor with this set-up. This excellent platform just deserves better than that.

The whole package (including rack,fenders and mesh seat) weighed 47.5 lbs. You lose a bit of weight with the fiberglass hardshell seat. That’s not any lighter than the competition but it’s not much heavier either. I honestly was expecting the trike to weigh a lot more than that.

When I took my first ride on the Explorer, I admit that I may have watched the many YouTube videos of Steintrikes a few too many times. Most of these videos feature Steintrikes riders powering through banked dirt corners, blasting down wooded trails, jumping over rather large ramps and curbs and just generally behaving like hooligans. I’d love to tell you that I restrained myself from doing anything at all like that until I knew the trike better, but I’d be lying.

I refuse to blame myself for this mischief. It’s all the Explorer’s fault. I’ve never ridden a trike before that so adamantly demanded you make very dangerous choices and make them often. The Explorer is like that kid who lived next door when you were 13. He was always getting kicked out of school for smoking or flipping the bird to principal. Every time you hung out with him, you knew he was going to try to talk you into doing something dangerous or illegal. Nonetheless, you still invited him over to the house almost every day after school. Steintrikes has definitely become the trike industry’s prototypical bad-boy.

The primary reason that the Explore tempts its rider into such blatant acts of hoonage is it’s amazing suspension. There are a full three inches of travel on all three wheels and every bit of it is tunable and very usable. As long as you’re going fast enough to “air it out” and not scrape the bottom of the trike, riding off of a curb at speed is a complete non-event. All you experience is a bit of silent air time and a soft landing on the other end.

The suspension isn’t only good for causing a scene. It also makes the Explorer a fairly competent off-roader. I took it on some moderate single track and other than some minor issues with rear wheel traction that you get on most tadpoles, it was a blast and very capable. It has plenty of ground clearance for riding over moderately-sized logs and rocks and the narrower hardshell seat allows you to throw tour body weight around where needed. The track is also plenty narrow enough to navigate most mountain bike paths.The tires that Velo Verde mounted up were a good compromise between on and off-road performance, but with a set of more serious knobbies, the Explorer would have been even better in the dirt. If it had been summer, I’d have taken the Explorer to the nearest ski-lift and had some real downhill mountain trike fun.

Once the obligatory silly phase had passed and I started really using the trike as a “normal” trike I was still impressed with the suspension. It’s definitely not a one-trick pony. The Explorer doesn’t just suck up the impact of YouTube-video-worthy jumps, it also does a very good job of absorbing less-serious imperfections. Once I got the settings right, I would hear that I had run over a crack in the pavement but rarely felt it much.

The suspension doesn’t bounce around when pedaling hard on the pavement either. It’s very well behaved and doesn’t suck up any amount of power that I could notice. I’m pretty sure that the front suspension actually pogoed less than any other full-suspension trike I’ve ever ridden. If I had the rear shock set up in full-on-idiot mode, it would move a bit when climbing and sprinting but it wasn’t hard to adjust it to a happy medium.

Most bikes and trikes that are designed to be competent off-road are quite slow when they get on the pavement. This is not exactly the case with the Explorer. No one will ever call it a “racing” trike but it was very close in performance to the other trikes I have in the house right now. It’s frame is stiff and the suspension doesn’t seem to suck much power. On my usual route, it was dead even with the HPVelotechnik Scorpion fs 26 in most conditions, a bit quicker than the ICE Adventure fs and a bit slower than the 2012 Catrike Road with rear suspension.

There were no unpleasant surprises in the handling department. Yes, there was a small amount of roll that could be felt from the cockpit but nothing that was remotely shocking or excessive. There was only a touch of brake steer and almost no pedal steer at all. The low speed turning circle is outstanding and high-speed handing is stable and predictable.

The Explorer proved to be a very comfortable trike to use every day. You’ll notice in photos that most Steitrikes come with a hardshell seat. However, there is also a mesh seat option. I found both of them to be pretty comfortable. The mesh seat’s cover definitely doesn’t look as good as the competition (a newer version is coming soon) and the seat frame itself had a couple of crude-looking hose clamps on it. Nonetheless, it did breath very well and was the most comfortable of the two.

The hardshell seat was lighter, looked better and was probably 85% as comfortable as the mesh. It also worked a lot better off-road because it let me use a bit more body english. The only real downside to the hardshell was that I felt a bit like I was sitting “on” the trike rather than “in” it. However, the fiberglass hardshell is the one that I wound up using most often.

From looking at photos of the Explorer (and most Steintrikes full-suspension models for that matter) I expected the drivetrain to be quite noisy due to some rather extreme chain angles. I was quite wrong. The large idlers and chain tubes actually do an excellent job of keeping things nice and quiet. I also never felt like I was losing much power at all from drivetrain friction. The idlers aren’t toothed and time will tell if they hold up to the abuse for long. But after 200 miles of riding, they show no wear at all. Steintrikes claims to have put thousands of kilometers on them without any significant wear.

SteinTrikes has also designed the Explorer to be a pretty competent… well… explorer. The rear rack on this trike can carry two good-sized panniers using a fairly unconventional rear rack. The reason for the “double hoop” design you see in the photos is that the suspension travel combined with the larger rear wheel makes it difficult to mount a rack with a conventional deck on top of it. If you did, it would have to be mounted so high that any sort of real load would have negative effects on the trike’s handling. Steintrikes is obsessive about keeping the cargo load as low and as far foreword as possible. HPVelotechnik (a company that designs the best recumbent pannier racks in the world) came to the same conclusion while designing a rack for the Scorpion fs 26. I found the rack that came with my Explorer test trike to be perfectly adequate for the type of tours I do, but if you don’t like to travel light and still want a Steintrikes I’d probably suggest opting for one of company’s 20” rear wheel models that has a more conventional rack.

Steintrikes also offers excellent and sturdy fenders, plenty of extra mounts for water bottles (unfortunately, none that you can reach when riding) and accessory mounts for lights or computers. There are also numerous extra braze-ons on the Explorer’s frame for things like DualDrive hubs, generators and a rear disc brake. Whatever you can imagine, it will probably mount up just fine.

So how did I feel about the Steintrikes Explorer overall? I’ll answer by asking a few questions. Could it stand just a tiny bit more refinement in a few detail areas? Yes. Is the suspension system complete overkill? Yes. Will 90% of Steintrikes’ customers use even half of what it can do? Absolutely not. Was I annoyed that there was nary a quick release in sight and that adjusting the seat angle sometimes required adjusting the frame length like a ten-year-old ICE trike? Very. Did I care about ANY of that while actually riding the thing? Not a bit.

When it comes right down to it, the Explorer was just a complete and utter blast to ride. It handled well, it was comfortable, it was very practical in daily use and if you chose to ride it like a complete jackass, it was ready for the job. At $3995, it’s not really even that expensive for a full suspension trike. And it’s from freaking Serbia! I never got tired of saying that when strangers on the bike path asked where it was made. It never failed to raise an eyebrow. There are other trikes out there can probably do most of what the Explorer can do with a bit more refinement and with a bit less flash, but none of them have the same untamed personality that Steintrikes has given their trikes. I am smitten.